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What excessive screen time does to the adult brain

longevity.stanford.edu

41–50 of 201 posts

Re: What excessive screen time does to the adult brain

#41
This may be because I no longer live an isolated American lifestyle, but my impression in Taiwan is that adults are hopelessly addicted to their phones.

This is gonna come off as obnoxious but I can't help it, whenever my partner and I go out for a nice dinner we're unable to comprehend how literally every other couple spends basically the entire meal on their phones. Sometimes one of them even has a little phone holder and just watches videos while they eat.

This plus absolutely mad levels of Instagram engagement makes me feel like we're at a critical era of phone addiction. You thought Americans were taking to IG and threads hoh boy go look up some Threads posts about the typhoon.

Anyway when I use reddit, IG, and even this site too much I am unhappy, and yet I continue the behavior. Clearly addictive relationship. Am I just sick and have an unhealthy relationship with my phone and other people just use and enjoy their phones? Or am I just more aware of the harm it causes me?

Re: What excessive screen time does to the adult brain

#43
I'm not very confident about the quality of this study... It already begins like this:

Evidence suggests that chronic sensory stimulation via excessive exposure to screen time may affect brain development in negative ways. Excessive smartphone use may increase the risk [...]

Do they consider "screen time" only to be "smartphone use"? Is it better to use a tablet? Or PC / laptop? What if I use a 6.7" screen with my computer? Does it count as "bad" screen time?

Also, do they take into account what you do on said screen? Reading a book, learning something or binging tiktok videos, watching the facade people put up on facebook / insta don't sound the same to me.

Re: What excessive screen time does to the adult brain

#44

Article and its linked studies fail to establish a causal relationship. Put another way the findings can also be summarized as, "broken people tend to have these habits."

"What the adult brain does to excessive screen time". I imagine there are probably feedback loops here too.

Re: What excessive screen time does to the adult brain

#45
post #11

“One of the biggest issues with picking up the phone right away in the morning is that when you have an object close to your face, it’s registered as a threat,” says Loeffler. “You wouldn’t want to wake up and look a bear in the face every morning. On a physiological level, it’s the same thing.” This is interesting to me. It does make some evolutionary sense but at the same time, i wake up every morning and look at m…

> wake up every morning and look at my girlfriends face, hopefully that does not subconsciously trigger the same response

Do you mean in her or in you?

Re: What excessive screen time does to the adult brain

#46
post #8

On my family's iPhones, we have a Shortcut (automation) that kicks in every evening at 9 pm: 1. Turn Mobile Data Off 2. Turn Bluetooth Off 3. Turn WiFi Off 4. Turn AppleTV off (this one is fun because it can cut off a show mid-sentence) 5. Set brightness to 10%. Then, a reverse of the above at 6am the following day. Normal phone signal is still enabled for any emergency calls, but most apps become useless without the…

This is great, thanks.

Re: What excessive screen time does to the adult brain

#47
post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I read but every night for 1-2hours? No way.

What's so strange about that as a concept? As someone who grew up in the 90s, the idea of doing so is totally normal for me. I mean, I don't do it, but I wouldn't blink at someone else saying they did. How do you think people achieve the goal of 50 books in a year, for example?

I read but 50 books in a year? No way.

Re: What excessive screen time does to the adult brain

#48
> excessive screen time, defined as more than two hours a day outside of work hours.

Having read Michel Desmurget's "La Fabrique du crétin digital", this sentence was moderately triggering. Has anyone here read it? I don't know if it's been translated to English yet, and I know it received some very bitter reviews [which mostly seemed beside the picture he was trying to construct from the studies he used, it seemed to me]. However, it did seem to attempt to take the problem seriously.

Re: What excessive screen time does to the adult brain

#49
post #11

“One of the biggest issues with picking up the phone right away in the morning is that when you have an object close to your face, it’s registered as a threat,” says Loeffler. “You wouldn’t want to wake up and look a bear in the face every morning. On a physiological level, it’s the same thing.” This is interesting to me. It does make some evolutionary sense but at the same time, i wake up every morning and look at m…

> It does make some evolutionary sense

Does it? It sounds total bs to me.

"When you have an object close to your face, it's registered as food, because you need to get close to your meal to eat it."

"When you have an object close to your face, it's registered as love, because parents needs to get close to their child to look after them."

When you have a statement that you can bend in an arbitrary way and still make some sense out of it, it's nonesense.

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